Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread

[Paul M]

I'd like to seriously suggest a revamp on how the civillians work from a programming perspective.

Rather than have each ship look for something, which is apparently cause massive time slow downs the more efficient way is to determine which transfers exist in terms of lots.

Once the lots have been determined (as in  5 lots of 10 infrastructure from Earth to Ganymede) then simply cycle through the shipping lines that have ships at the place where the lot is to pick it up.  If a lot exists and no ships are there then randomly select a shipping line to go get it.

I'm sure a programmer who knows whatever language the program is coded in could suggest more efficieny improvements.  But the essence is that with a few flags you can reduce the number of checks significantly.  If there is nothing to be moved then the whole step gets skipped.  Perhaps I'm naive but working out the lots to be moved has to be faster than checking each and every ship to see what it can move.  If there are no colonists to move you skip 25% or more of the ships for example.  And the process ends when the number of lots un-allocated is 0.  So the check time should dratically speed up.

This should reduce the slow down due to the number of civillian ships as the only thing that will matter is the number of lots to be moved not the hulls looking for a lot to move.

Also this should happen with government contracts.  I often see more ships heading for the job then are needed.  That means time was wasted in assigning ships that will do nothing for the task.

[amimai]

Since in the next patch were getting a whole bunch of simplifications to speed up AI i was wondering would it be possible to implement off screen rules for AI that are outside explored space?

Simply put if the ai are doing something outside explored space even if its combat it does not cause interrupts nad the game keeps running sim without stopping time (while running AI battle off screen)

or is this impossible or somesuch?

[Steve Walmsley]

This should reduce the slow down due to the number of civillian ships as the only thing that will matter is the number of lots to be moved not the hulls looking for a lot to move.

I've never really seen the slowdowns with civilian traffic. I don't know if it is the new pathfinding code but I am running fourteen player races at the moment without any problems.

[Steve Walmsley]

Since in the next patch were getting a whole bunch of simplifications to speed up AI i was wondering would it be possible to implement off screen rules for AI that are outside explored space?

Simply put if the ai are doing something outside explored space even if its combat it does not cause interrupts nad the game keeps running sim without stopping time (while running AI battle off screen)

or is this impossible or somesuch?

If you can lay out the rules for how NPRs fight without actually using the combat code, I would be happy to implement them

[MarcAFK]

Haha.  Well some kind of abstraction would work. But I would prefer just an option to  prevent the game stopping for NPR stuff and continue until the increment I specified.

[amimai]

just sim those systems that are in the "off screen" category like econ events ect on a cycle that doesn't cause interrupts

everything for the AI runs as usual but instead of halting in the middle of the "players" 30 day time skip the time skip keeps running even as those events that the AI perpetrate on other AI at the other end of the galaxy sim

its literaly as simple as "if the player can't see it, it does not cause the player time skip to stop"
even while the AI stops time skip, does stuff, and restarts it in the background

fancy infographic time!

Off-Topic: show

although their may be a need for a "please wait while we sim the AI actually PLAYING THE GAME" waiting icon to avoid rage and "help my game is freeze" the may happen if the AI takes a really long time to play out their wars where player can not see it; loading/progress bar
[time skip is: 0=====|>---30]

[Paul M]

I've never really seen the slowdowns with civilian traffic. I don't know if it is the new pathfinding code but I am running fourteen player races at the moment without any problems.

As I understand the posts on the issue it is the total number of ships the civillians have.  Apparently once a day each ship looks for something to transport.  There are several topics related to speeding up the game and they zero in on the size of the civillian merchant marine.  People use NPRs to hunt them down or whatever apparently.  I certainly can't comment myself, my game is at about 5 min for a 5 day turn (or less days game time if it is interupted) with 40+ clicks to clear the damned crew morale bug thing away.

My comment is basically to search for a ship for the lot as then you only have to execute as many searches as there are lots.  That has to be faster than the other way around.  I was also hoping you could get some "outsourced" help on the matter.

[Steve Walmsley]

just sim those systems that are in the "off screen" category like econ events ect on a cycle that doesn't cause interrupts

everything for the AI runs as usual but instead of halting in the middle of the "players" 30 day time skip the time skip keeps running even as those events that the AI perpetrate on other AI at the other end of the galaxy sim

its literaly as simple as "if the player can't see it, it does not cause the player time skip to stop"
even while the AI stops time skip, does stuff, and restarts it in the background

fancy infographic time!

Off-Topic: show

although their may be a need for a "please wait while we sim the AI actually PLAYING THE GAME" waiting icon to avoid rage and "help my game is freeze" the may happen if the AI takes a really long time to play out their wars where player can not see it; loading/progress bar
[time skip is: 0=====|>---30]

Aurora is a little more complicated than that

For example, how do I determine in the midst of the 30 day time step when two AI races detect each other. How do I determine when they are in range to fire? How do they react to the results of that fire or to the change courses of enemy ships? or to more ships entering the system?

In the next version you have the option to disable NPR vs NPR detection when no player ships are present, which will eliminate the above if you want speed at the expense of realism. However, there is no way to abstract combat in the manner you describe because all the AI code /detection code / combat code / movement code is built into the increment process. Without increments the AI can't detect anything or react to anything, or shoot anything, or plan anything.

BTW the only time I actually use 30 day time steps is early in a conventional campaign. My standard is 1-day time steps.

[Steve Walmsley]

As I understand the posts on the issue it is the total number of ships the civillians have.  Apparently once a day each ship looks for something to transport.  There are several topics related to speeding up the game and they zero in on the size of the civillian merchant marine.  People use NPRs to hunt them down or whatever apparently.  I certainly can't comment myself, my game is at about 5 min for a 5 day turn (or less days game time if it is interupted) with 40+ clicks to clear the damned crew morale bug thing away.

My comment is basically to search for a ship for the lot as then you only have to execute as many searches as there are lots.  That has to be faster than the other way around.  I was also hoping you could get some "outsourced" help on the matter.

That isn't how the civilians work. It sounds like something else is causing the slowdown. A civilian selects a trade run or colonist run and doesn't check again until that is completed, which can be weeks or months later. I have 164 civilian ships in my current campaign and the 1-day increments take about 4-5 seconds.

What is the crew morale bug? I thought the issue with morale was already fixed

[MarcAFK]

Paul started his epic campaign ages ago, as I recall he's running in 6.10 .
I've said this before many times but I know 5 second increments are essential for working out parts of the simulation, but I just would live an option for them to not stop turn processing unless they're actually caused by my own sensors.
Edit: I think that is part of what amimai was suggesting. Basically keep running turn processing as normal but don't stop unless it's something that's relevant to the player.

[Paul M]

That isn't how the civilians work. It sounds like something else is causing the slowdown. A civilian selects a trade run or colonist run and doesn't check again until that is completed, which can be weeks or months later. I have 164 civilian ships in my current campaign and the 1-day increments take about 4-5 seconds.

What is the crew morale bug? I thought the issue with morale was already fixed

Well I did a quick look for the topics but they aren't obviously visable but I clearly recall reading some that put the blame for the game slowdown squarely on the civillians and the fact they look for a job for each un-occupied ship on a daily basis.  I would love to have 1 day at 4-5 seconds I'm afraid 1 day for me is well over a minute.  People were commenting they created NPRs solely for the purpose of blowing up their own civillian shipping when it "got out of hand."

I would think the morale issue has been fixed but I am using 6.1 and for that version it isn't fixed...so I have to click away a crap load of errors due to crew morale due to the age of a ship as the ship is considered deployed or something.

I am seeing an error where the deployment time of a docked small craft increases as the ships deployment clock rather than remaining at 0 until launched, but this is a different matter.

[MarcAFK]

I believe that was fixed too. Your horribly long increments might just be the way vb handles those errors. Is it possible to fix with designer mode I wonder?

[xeryon]

As suggested by HavingPhun in http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=7893.msg80590;topicseen#new

Suppress error popup windows regardless of issue.

Simple then: checkmark option to have all popup error windows dump data to a temp log file instead of error windows.  Game will keep running until it doesn't regardless of the errors.  Use at your own peril.

[Paul M]

I believe that was fixed too. Your horribly long increments might just be the way vb handles those errors. Is it possible to fix with designer mode I wonder?

Hmmmm...a 1 day turn takes a few minutes, followed by the ERROR xxxx which requires, last count, about 40 clicks to get past then there is 10-15 seconds more turn processing...if this is the case then the 10-15 seconds is likely the real turn processing time and the rest due to dealing with errors...  But as I know diddly about access I'm kinda dubious I could fix anything even in designer mode (unless we are talking straightforward well described steps here).

[MarcAFK]

Well the errors are from an already fixed morale bug, so you could open the database and modify the deployment time for all affected units, it shouldn't be too time consuming with only 40 units, just open in a text editor and search for whatever string precedes deployment time.